Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has advocated open-source and industry standards as a way to prevent vendor lock-in in the nebulous cloud computing market.
Shuttleworth said portability is "key" to helping avoid what he called "really gross lock-in issues".
Shuttleworth also deflated some of the cloud hype, saying the phrase " …

COMMENTS

...or Google Appengine

Google's Appengine is a different type of cloud - a lot higher level, so you don't have to worry about the OS - which is good if you believe Google's sysadmins are better than you, and bad if you want to do low-level tinkering (using any port but http, for instance).

Standardising this would be a very different exercise, requiring standardised APIs rather than standardised machine image management.

And of course the advantage of a Cloud

is you can have an inhouse cloud, do your backups to part of a 'freinds' cloud and vice versa and have all your internal machines as part of your cloud, all users do their work in the cloud and 95% of your system admin goes out the window and no other parasite owns your data.